Steam sets a new record as over 7 million gamers log in at once

Assuming Steam's user base is still around the 65 million mark, as Valve reported at the end of the October, over 10 percent of the gaming platform's patrons were logged-in at the same time yesterday, setting a record in the process. More than seven million people were online simultaneously, which is roughly a million above the peak login record Steam hit around the same time last year. While that number might be fact, whether it holds any meaning is altogether harder to deduce. Is this indicative of a surge in PC gaming? Well, we'd need way more stats to make that kind of claim, as fluctuations in the user base of huge non-Steam titles like World of Warcraft, League of Legends and Starcraft 2 to name a few, surely play a part in that discussion.

One could also hypothesize the record shows PCs holding firm following a few recent, rather high-profile consolelaunches, but these Steam users may also have new black boxes in their living rooms. Not that we think there's anything better than killing a lazy Sunday playing Dota 2, but perhaps the number of concurrent logins were just a bunch of people who thought to check Steam for one last bargain. Who knows, maybe it was aliens? With Valve getting ready to flog its own hardware and OS, though, we know at least one person that's seen seven million and hasn't stopped rubbing his hands together since.